New Line Preps New 'Nightmare on Elm Street'

You can't keep a good monster dead. Bloody Disgusting is reporting that New Line Cinema is "actively developing another Nightmare on Elm Street movie." Bloody Disgusting broke the news nearly two years ago that New Line was planning a prequel to the horror series that began in 1984; as Scott Weinberg posted, it would have covered "the back-story of the pre-dead Freddy Krueger, his unseemly relationship with numerous small children, and the neighborhood parents who strike back ... thereby creating an undead boogeyman who'll haunt them for the next 8 movies." Robert Englund, who played Freddy Krueger, and versatile director John McNaughton were attached to the project.

Those plans have reportedly been scrapped. Instead of an origin story, like the recent Halloween "re-imagination" perpetrated by Rob Zombie, the new Nightmare will be ... something else. New Line is throwing around ideas, apparently, without anything being locked down. Of course, with the ongoing writers' strike, they can't write anything down or have any writer pitch them anything. I imagine a roomful of bedraggled execs, some of whom have never seen any of the Nightmare movies, sitting around a big table, drinking stale coffee, and trying to come up with a new story line. "Can we send him into space in the future? How about if he terrorizes a big city? What if we do it from the POV of a bunch of kids with video cameras?"

In related Freddy Krueger news, Bloody Disgusting's source at New Line says that there are no immediate plans for a sequel to Freddy vs. Jason. Note: the emphasis is on "immediate," which sounds to me like they're putting this on the back burner and maybe allowing a few more years to pass before resurrecting the deranged duo.